Designing and Implementing an Effective Tobacco Counter-Marketing Campaign 

Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 267 

Chapter 10 

Grassroots Marketing
 

We never said ‘don’t smoke.’ Teens aren’t looking for more 

preaching; they’re looking for the opposite, actually— 

a chance to be independent and rebellious. So that’s what 

Students Working Against Tobacco was all about. We didn’t	 

preach to our friends. We got a bunch of kids together to 

make a statement to the tobacco industry—to rebel 

against them. 

—	 Jared Perez, founding marketing director 
 

Florida’s Students Working Against Tobacco 
 

Grassroots marketing encourages people to participate in your countermarketing program. It gets new people involved, increases the involvement of 

those already reached by your campaign, and employs those already engaged 

to increase your target audience’s exposure to key messages or services. A 

collection of tactics falls under the heading of grassroots marketing: events, 

community organizing, partnerships, and some forms of “permission marketing” (offering benefits to audience members in exchange for permission to 

continue marketing to them). What brings them together is their purpose: 

they’re all about establishing and using participation. (For information on 

grassroots efforts for policy change, see Chapter 9: Media Advocacy.) 

Involving people isn’t easy, but it can help you significantly in achieving your 

goal of decreasing tobacco use or exposure to secondhand smoke. People 

involved in antitobacco activities are less likely to smoke or chew tobacco 

themselves and are more likely to urge their friends or family members to 

quit. Through grassroots marketing, you can build community support for 

your cause—which is critical to every part of your effort—and you can use 

In This Chapter 
 

• 	 Getting People 

Involved 

• 	 Helping Those 

Involved To 

Become More 

Engaged 

• 	 Using Community 

Partners To Reach 

Your Audience 

• 	 Evaluating Your 

Grassroots 

Marketing Efforts 
268 Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 

community partners to carry messages to your 

target audience, enhancing exposure (how 

many people get the message), relevance 

(whether they care about it), and, in certain 

cases, credibility (whether they believe it). For 

example, a father might care more about what 

his wife says (“The smoke in restaurants 

bothers our son. I’m going to a rally for smokefree restaurants. Want to come?”) than what he 

hears on television (“Secondhand smoke is 

harmful to children”). The key is to remember 

that different people offer credibility on different topics for different audiences. For example, 

you may trust your doctor for health information, 

but you’d turn to a mechanic for information 

on car repair. 

Keep in mind that community partners aren’t 

commercial spokespeople. They’re not under 

your control, and they don’t always follow the 

script. However, grassroots activities work best 

when community participants are treated as 

partners, at least to some extent. The freedom 

to make choices is part of what makes an activity powerful for the participant. A clear example 

is when grassroots marketing is tied to media 

advocacy. When community members are 

treated as partners in creating an advocacy 

activity, the activity may not be as polished as 

one that’s organized entirely by professionals. 

However, being part of the decision making 

draws the people involved deeper into the 

issue. They emerge more committed and more 

credible on the issue to other community 

members, not because they know every message verbatim, but because they believe in what 

they’re saying. This doesn’t mean that you want 

them to be off strategy, saying or doing things 

that aren’t in line with your central messages or 

goals. The constant challenge for the manager 

of a grassroots marketing program is to find the 

right balance between choices and control. 

This chapter describes some of the tactics that 

successful counter-marketing campaigns have 

used to address the following three goals of 

grassroots marketing: 

1.	 Getting people involved 

2.	 Helping those involved to become 
 

more engaged
 

3.	 Using partners to extend the reach and 

frequency of your messages 

What Grassroots Marketing Can and Can’t Do 

Can 

■	 Involve people 

■	 Create interpersonal exposure 

to a message 

■	 Channel some feedback 

■	 Build community support 

Can’t 

■	 Substitute for strategy 

■	 Be tightly controlled 

■	 Expose a broad audience to 

a very specific message 
Designing and Implementing an Effective Tobacco Counter-Marketing Campaign 

■ Offer them something that they want. 

Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 269 

Keys to Involvement 

■ Decide whom you want to involve. 

■ Make it easy for them to participate. 

Getting People Involved 

What’s true about marketing in general is also 

true about grassroots marketing: If you want 

people to get involved, you need to offer them 

something that they want. You will also need 

to make it easy for them to participate. To use 

commercial marketing terms, you will need to 

offer potential participants high value at low 

cost. 

Tobacco counter-marketing programs have gotten people 

involved by offering benefits like 

glamour, recognition, and—quite 

simply—fun. Programs hold 

activities when and where people 

can easily attend. This may mean 

scheduling an activity after work 

or school and in the target audience’s neighborhood or, better 

yet, holding an activity at another 

event that is already drawing the 

kind of people that you want. 

Start with identifying the audience that you 

want to reach: Is it young children? Policy 

makers? Hispanic parents? Women? The 

answer will depend on your overall program 

goal and specific grassroots goal. If your program goal is to reduce exposure to secondhand smoke and your specific grassroots goal 

is to change the social norms around tobacco 

use, you may want to include policy makers 

with influence over smokefree restaurant ordinances as one of your target audiences. 

The audience(s) you select will help determine 

the character of the tactic that you use. 

Offering recognition may draw involvement 

from policy makers; a contest may interest 

young children. Be creative: You may want to 

invent something new, but you don’t have to 

start from scratch. Here are tactics that some 

counter-marketing campaigns have used and 

that others have replicated. 

Recognition events. Some of the most important people to recruit in a counter-marketing 

campaign are those with a lot of influence 

over potential and current smokers. These 

“influentials” may be role models or people 

in a position to control widely distributed 

tobacco-related images, such as entertainers, 
270 Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 

reporters, and publishers. Recognition events 

are one way to earn the attention of such influentials in the news media and the entertainment industry. By honoring people who do the 

right thing (portray tobacco honestly) or by 

exposing people who do the wrong thing 

(glamorize tobacco), you can offer a benefit 

that many in-fluentials seek—positive publicity. For example, California presents its 

“Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down!” awards for 

tobacco use in movies, and the National 

Institute on Drug Abuse presents its PRISM 

awards for the accurate portrayal of drug, alcohol, and tobacco use in entertainment. These 

types of events might help you recruit influentials to be part of a campaign. 

Glamour events. Building excitement is one 

way to attract people. You can piggyback on 

news events to make your campaign seem 

current and important or invite celebrities to 

participate. The key is to make sure that you 

stay focused on one of your messages. The 

American Lung Association in Sacramento, 

California, does just that to teach media literacy, piggybacking on the Emmy Awards to illustrate how tobacco is glamorized and normalized 

on TV. The American Lung Association’s 

Flemmy Awards are presented each year to TV 

shows that inaccurately depict tobacco. This 

event draws considerable media attention and 

highlights a message about how smoking isn’t 

as glamorous or as common in real life as it is 

depicted on TV. 

Advocacy events. Activities that advocate for 

better tobacco policies, such as restrictions on 

smoking, are not only valuable tools for changing policies, but also a way to get more people 

involved in tobacco control. Among other 

advocacy activities, tobacco control advocates 

have urged restaurants and bars to go smokefree, pleaded with magazines to refuse tobacco 

advertising, and campaigned to limit tobacco 

advertising in stores. States can also piggyback 

on national advocacy events, such as the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids’ “Kick Butts Day.” 
Designing and Implementing an Effective Tobacco Counter-Marketing Campaign 

Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 271 

Activities within events. Drawing a crowd— 

or the media—is no easy task. Sometimes, 

instead of trying to create an event, programs 

piggyback on existing events. Activities can 

range from setting up a booth at an ethnic festival to distributing materials at a rock concert. 

Florida’s “truth” campaign sent its “truth truck” 

to rock concerts sponsored by tobacco brands 

to offer a needed counterpoint and to recruit 

youth volunteers. The “truth” campaign also 

set up booths at concerts to collect signatures 

petitioning Hollywood stars for more accurate 

portrayals of tobacco. California distributed its 

“Gold Card,” which was designed to look like a 

gold credit card and contained the state’s quitline number on it, at numerous events. People 

placed the cards in their wallets and, therefore, 

had the quitline number available when they 

needed it. The Gold Card is now the fourthranked source of calls to the quitline. 

Research activities. Hearing about something 

is one thing; learning about it is another. Some 

tobacco control programs create community 

activities in which people collect data about 

their own environment—and become more 

aware of what’s around them as a result. 

California’s Operation Storefront, for example, 

recruited local youth to collect information 

about the amount and type of point-ofpurchase advertising done in grocery and 

convenience stores. Then the youth publicized 

the results. Although youth might not gather 

information that is as reliable as what can be 

gathered by evaluation professionals, the community involvement and subsequent publicity 

can help engage more people in tobaccorelated issues. The Montana “Most of Us” 

project relied on grassroots marketing activities to enhance and broaden the reach of its 

media campaign. Students in a high school 

math class conducted a school survey on 

tobacco use, demonstrating for themselves the 

campaign’s message that the majority of teens 

don’t use tobacco. Another example from Contra 

Costa County, California, involved coalition 

members who conducted informal opinion 

polls, surveying community members about 

their dining preferences (i.e., smoking or nonsmoking section), as a way to personalize attitudes and convey them to local officials during 

hearings on smokefree restaurant ordinances. 

Contests. A prize is one of the most common 

benefits offered in exchange for involvement. 

Poster contests often are used to encourage 

young people, typically those in middle school 

and younger, to think about the downside to 

tobacco use. Unfortunately, young people 

often are asked to create these messages in a 

vacuum: they have no information about what 

kinds of messages might work. Messages 

developed without the benefit of research are 

less likely to be effective. Using these messages 

in a campaign (e.g., by buying space on local 

billboards) is risky. The most effective contests 

are those that stick to your strategy. In Florida’s 

teen-oriented “truth” campaign, the program 

emphasized its messages about industry 

manipulation by creating a contest that asked 

teens what they might say to a tobacco executive. The teen who submitted the winning 

answer received an award from Music 

Television (MTV). 
272 Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 

Using specialties and giveaways. Grassroots 

activities often lend themselves to advertising 

specialties and giveaways, such as pens, Tshirts, and stickers. If you plan to use these 

types of materials, first make sure that they fit 

with your strategy (e.g., California distributed 

Gold Cards to promote its quitline). Second, 

don’t let each community or group create their 

own materials. To maintain a consistent 

message and to create efficiencies of scale, 

you’ll want to produce the materials centrally 

and then distribute them to your partners for 

dissemination. 

Helping Those Involved To Become 

More Engaged 

Successful events are good ways to involve 

people initially, but you’ll make a bigger 

impact if you become a more regular part of 

their lives. You’ll want some people to 

become truly engaged in your campaign—to 

feel a part of it. This is critical if one of your 

goals is policy change. A tobacco control 

program can go only so far, especially if it’s 

managed by a government health department 

that can’t lobby for policy changes. At some 

point, people in a community need to press for 

change or it won’t happen, which is why 

community programs are included as a critical 

component in the Centers for Disease Control 

and Prevention’s Best Practices for 

Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs 

(CDC 1999). 

Different people will be interested in different 

levels of involvement. You should try to 

accommodate as many levels of involvement 

as possible, then “sell up”—encourage them to 

become more involved over time. In marketing, this relationship is sometimes called 

“permission marketing”: You offer benefits to 

audience members in exchange for permission 

to continue marketing to them. The goal is not 

to make a single “sale,” but to develop a 

longer-term relationship that will involve 

many “sales” or interactions over a lifetime. 

For example, sometimes marketers send useful 

information by e-mail in exchange for 

information about your purchase preferences, 

then follow up with an offer to sell you something customized to your needs. The difference 

with tobacco control advocacy is that you’re 

not selling a product; rather, you’re “selling” 

the idea of actively supporting the program. 

Grassroots counter-marketing campaigns have 

several general levels of engagement: 

■	 	 Sampler. The lowest level of engagement 

is when people agree to participate in 

one activity based on the benefits of that 

activity. One example is a child who will 

participate in a poster contest because 

he likes to draw. He may not have 
Designing and Implementing an Effective Tobacco Counter-Marketing Campaign 

Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 273 

bought into the larger antitobacco 

effort. 

■	 	 Ally. An Ally is someone who agrees 

with your overall goals and will be part 

of an activity if it seems interesting, 

fun, or important. 

■	 	 Believer. A Believer wants to help your 

cause and is probably thinking of ways 

to involve others. Believers will participate in almost any activity that they 

think will further the goals of the effort. 

Believers are obviously valuable, but not everybody you reach can be a Believer. Few people 

are committed tobacco control advocates the 

first time that they hear about the issue. People 

change their opinions and level of commitment gradually. Programs attract Samplers, 

whom they try to convert to Allies. Some of 

those Allies eventually become Believers. Just a 

handful of those that you recruit are likely to 

become Believers. 

There are many reasons to have people 

engaged in your program and many ways that 

they can make a difference. Once people get 

involved, you’ll face issues related to organizing, 

effective advocacy tactics, and governance. 

Although those are important issues for the 

program at large, this chapter will only address 

the most salient marketing issue: How do you 

entice people to become more and more 

involved? 

This question has been around for a long time. 

Active, organized grassroots support for tobacco control is often limited 

to the public health community. However, it doesn’t have to be. Successful 

tobacco control programs have enlisted wide 

support on occasion by 

appealing to various 

groups, such as women’s 

organizations, organizations that represent other 

specific populations, and, 

most notably, youth. Five 

of the most common 

ways that programs have engaged people in 

their effort on an ongoing basis are: 

1.	 	Community coalitions. Community 
 

members guide boards that may issue 
 

grants, implement community activities, 
 

or author community planning docu­
 

ments. 
 

2.	 	Advocacy group. Members and their 
 

supporters engage in statewide and 
 

community tobacco control activities. 
 
274 Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 

3.	 	Internet communities. A group of 

tobacco advocates can network and 

share ideas through a Web site or an 

e-mail list (listserv). 

4.	 	Professional groups. Such groups 

engage or target influential professionals, such as scriptwriters or physicians, 

to change how their professional group 

deals with tobacco. 

5.	 	Partnerships. The tobacco control 

program creates an ongoing relationship 

with another organization that may support tobacco control, or some aspect of 

it, but may not have tobacco control as 

one of its main goals. The program also 

engages the organization’s members in 

furthering tobacco control goals. 

There are almost as many ways to create these 

relationships as there are established groups. A 

lot will depend on where you’re starting. Does 

a group already exist? Is the group well positioned to broaden its numbers? What kind of 

presence does the government agency overseeing the tobacco control program already 

have at the community level? Regardless of 

where you start, those with experience in 

grassroots marketing say that three principles 

should be followed in nearly every case: 

1.	 	Be clear about the purpose of the relationship. People will want to know 

where they fit with the overall goals of 

the program. The clearer that you are 

about the role you need them to play, 

the more informed they will be about 

whether they want to play that role. 

2.	 	Show your partners that they will be 

doing meaningful work. If people think 

that they’re contributing to something 

they believe will make a difference, 

they’re more likely to stay involved. This 

means that you need to allow for their 

contributions. Your participants need to 

be treated as partners who can help 

mold the effort, rather than servants 

simply being asked to undertake some 

tasks. Once you engage them, you’ll also 

need to show them often that they’re 

making important progress toward the 

goal. Your positive feedback will help to 

keep them motivated to do sometimes 

difficult and time-consuming work. 

3.	 	Make it easy. Try to minimize the barriers to getting involved, such as long or 

numerous meetings. Focus on what 

people want to do, not just on what you 

need them to do. Also, find out more 

about them—their strengths, experiences, and interests—to make the best 

match with the work to be done. For 

example, the former Coalition for a 

Healthy and Responsible Georgia 

(CHARGe) devoted 15 to 20 minutes 

during each of its coalition meetings to 

writing letters to legislators, newspaper 

editors, and other influentials to educate 

them about the tobacco settlement 

issue. They provided all of the necessary 

templates and materials, including 

preaddressed, postage-paid envelopes, 

so that it would be as easy as possible 

for coalition members to take action. 
Designing and Implementing an Effective Tobacco Counter-Marketing Campaign 

Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 275 

Using Community Partners To 	 

Reach Your Audience 	 

However, recall that using community partners 

is not the same as paid advertising. You lose 

some control over the message and how it’s 

presented. This can be minimized through 

training, but will always be a consideration. 

You are relying on your partners’ credibility, 

not just your own. This can be positive. For 

example, some people will believe the 

American Cancer Society more than they’ll 

believe the state health department. However, 

it also raises difficult issues. For example, 

youth who become antitobacco advocates 

aren’t always the trendsetters in school. What if 

a teen who’s widely regarded by his peers as 

“uncool” or a “goody two-shoes” is the main 

spokesperson in his school saying smoking

isn’t cool? The message may lack credibility. 

This is another reason that balancing the 

desires of your grassroots advocates with the 

Leveraging the interest and enthusiasm of 

community partners (which may include 

people at both the Ally and Believer levels of 

commitment) is an inexpensive way to boost 

the reach and frequency of your messages. But 

remember that the people you want to change 

are probably not the same people who will be 

involved in your program. Youth smokers, for	 

example, are typically not joiners: They don’t 

want to be part of an antitobacco group or any 

organized group. So although your partners 

aren’t necessarily the people that you’re trying 

to reach, they should be people who can talk 

to your audience—both directly and through 

the attention that their events attract—without 

turning them off.	 

Case Study: Reaching Georgia Legislators 

To encourage more legislators to support the allocation of tobacco settlement funds to tobacco control, 

the former Coalition for a Healthy and Responsible Georgia (CHARGe) organized and executed several 

efforts to involve advocates and community members at a grassroots level. First, they held community 

forums to educate individuals at the local level about the importance of allocating one-third of tobacco 

settlement dollars to tobacco prevention and control efforts. At those educational forums, they provided 

participants with sample letters to the editor, sample letters to legislators, fact sheets, talking points, and 

other materials to make it easy for participants to take action. A few months later, the American Cancer 

Society, the American Heart Association, and the American Lung Association, in partnership with the 

Fletcher Martin Ewing ad agency, developed a trifold brochure that summarized for local advocates the 

key benefits of allocating settlement funds to tobacco prevention and control, and included a tear-card 

that advocates could send to their local legislators about the issue. In addition, CHARGe and the Georgia 

Health Department’s Tobacco Use Prevention Program developed a companion brochure that educated 

Georgians on the burden of tobacco in Georgia. (For more information, see Appendix 10.1: Georgia 

Burden of Tobacco Brochure.) 
276 Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 

goals of your program is so important. In the 

example above, this teen could be steered into 

activities where he could be the most effective—perhaps making a presentation to the 

school board instead of lecturing his peers. 

The main guideline here is that you must consider how your audience views your partners. 

Your partners may have credibility with your 

audience on some issues, but not on others. In 

Florida, teachers were encouraged to present 

media literacy modules that help teens deconstruct advertising. However, teachers were 

asked not to distribute any “truth”-branded 

materials because this antitobacco brand was 

supposed to be young and rebellious. It would 

have been much cheaper to promote the 

“truth” brand through the schools than through 

TV and events, but Florida passed up this costeffective dissemination channel because it 

lacked the right kind of credibility to reposition 

tobacco control as hip and young. 

The choices aren’t always clear. Florida went so 

far as to brand its youth advocacy group as 

“Students Working Against Tobacco” (SWAT), instead of the much more widely recognized 

“truth.” This was a way to put distance between 

the state’s real youth advocates (who may or 

may not be seen by their peers as cool) and the 

state’s hip, advertising-driven antitobacco 

brand. On the other hand, Minnesota branded 

both its teen advertising and its youth advocacy 

group as Target Market (TM), to invest more 

marketing muscle in creating activism and to 

save the cost of creating two brands. Both states 

have had documented success. 

When using partners as a dissemination channel, a program manager also must match the 

right message with the right partner. Again, 

partners should only disseminate messages 

that will seem credible coming from them. 

Police, for example, may be good messengers 

on issues of law (such as enforcing smokefree 

restaurant policies or laws on youth access to 

tobacco), but less credible with youth on the 

practices of other youth. (“How would a police 

officer know how many of us smoke?” a teen 

might wonder. “Who is going to tell him?”) 

This is true, regardless of whether the partner 

actually is an authority on the subject. The key 

question is whether the audience perceives 

him or her as an authority. 

Partners can use dozens of tactics to disseminate messages. Four of the most common 

tactics are: 

1.	 	Media events. Partners often hold media 

events that, while not explicitly targeting 

potential tobacco users, are designed to 

send them a message. Many of the antiindustry events are staged with this in 

mind. Few partners expect the industry 

to change, but anti-industry events can 

highlight a message to smokers that the 

industry is trying to manipulate them. 

2.	 	Counter-advertising. Community 

groups rarely have enough money to 

buy a significant amount of media space 

or time. Sometimes they can develop a 

partnership with a local TV station or 

newspaper to place antitobacco advertising at low or no cost. It is also possible 

to develop a partnership with a radio 

disc jockey who is willing to read live 
Designing and Implementing an Effective Tobacco Counter-Marketing Campaign 

Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 277 

announcer radio ads, at no cost to 

the program. 

3.	 	Speaking. Partners can be very credible 

spokespeople when addressing community groups or their peers (especially 

younger peers). Several states have created programs where high school-age 

antitobacco advocates speak to students 

in elementary or middle schools. In 

Contra Costa County, California, coalition members persuasively presented 

qualitative research findings regarding 

community members’ preferences for 

smokefree restaurants to local officials 

during hearings regarding smokefree 

restaurant ordinances. 

4.	 	Advocacy. As mentioned previously, 

advocacy activities can serve a number 

of purposes beyond a change in policy. 

One is positioning the issue with the 

target audience. Advocating for smokefree restaurants, for example, is a way to 

disseminate messages about secondhand 

tobacco smoke. For example, SmokeLess 

States Coalitions throughout the country 

initiated a “tobacco tax challenge” to the 

state governors, challenging them to 

help save lives (and increase state funds) 

by raising their tobacco taxes. 

What makes a dissemination effort by your 

partners effective? Program managers suggest 

several guidelines for making it work: 

■	 	 Involve your partners early. People who 

agree with your goal may not support 

your campaign if they feel like outsiders. 

If they don’t understand your strategy, 

they could inadvertently promote messages that may undermine your effort. 

(If your strategy is to make not smoking 

rebellious, it would probably be counterproductive to warn teens that youth 

caught smoking will be punished.) Help 

them understand what you’re trying to 

achieve (goal, key audiences, and message strategies) and the important role 

that you want them to play. Give them 

as much information as they need or 

want to do a good job and to sense the 

urgency of the issue. 

■	 	 Keep your partners in the loop. When 

you surprise your partners, you run the 

risk of lost opportunities as well as hurt 

feelings. You probably don’t know all of 

the ways that your partners could assist 

you in your marketing effort. By keeping 

them in the loop, you can be apprised of 

opportunities to leverage your investment. 

■	 	 Match the right message with the right 

partner. As mentioned, no one is credible 

with every audience on every subject. 

Encourage your partners to focus on the 

messages that they’re in the best position 

to deliver. They don’t simply need to be 

able to reach the audience efficiently— 

they also need to be effective in what 

they say and how they say it. That 

means that they need to convey messages on which they are credible. 

■	 	 Provide training. If you want your partners to be on message, you will have to 

train them as spokespeople for your 
278 Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 

campaign. Provide talking points and 

tips on how to talk to reporters, and let 

them practice if you can. 

Evaluating Your Grassroots 

Marketing Efforts 

To maximize the effectiveness of your grassroots marketing efforts, you’ll need to evaluate 

what you’re doing. Evaluation will not only 

help you report to stakeholders about what 

you’re doing, but it will also give you valuable 

insight about how to improve your approach. 

Adjusting your approach based on evaluation 

results can help you get more types of people 

involved and deepen their commitment 

and involvement. 

Evaluation can help you answer questions 

such as the following: 

■	 	 How is the funding for grassroots 

marketing being used? 

■	 	 Was your approach implemented 

as planned? 

■	 	 Did you reach your target audience, 

and did audience members find your 

approach to be beneficial, fun, accessible, and convenient? 

■	 	 Did you reach a broad range of community partners? Were the partners credible 

to audience members and willing to deliver the antitobacco message to them? 

■	 	 What tactics were most effective in reaching these partners? What tactics did partners use for disseminating 

antitobacco messages, and 

how effective were they in 

reaching the target audience? 

■	 	 Did your effort help increase 

the audience’s level of commitmentor involvement? 

■	 	 How can you use the results 

of the evaluation to improve 

your grassroots approach? 

How to Evaluate Your Grassroots 

Marketing Efforts 

You may want to review Chapter 5: Evaluating 

the Success of Your Counter-Marketing 

Program, which addresses the evaluation 

process in depth. Be pragmatic in developing 

your evaluation, and use an approach based 

on how the results will be used. Once you have 

determined whom the evaluation is for and 

what information they will need, you can 

develop the best questions to find out what 

you need to know, determine how to get the 

answers to those questions, and then provide 

the information to those who need it in a way 
Designing and Implementing an Effective Tobacco Counter-Marketing Campaign 

Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 279 

that they can use. To do this, you’ll want to involve 

those intended users in shaping the evaluation from 

the start. At a minimum, you’ll want to assess both 

your process (process evaluation) and the outcome of 

your efforts (outcome evaluation). To conduct a 

process evaluation, you can use implementation logs 

to 

systematically monitor and track what you’re doing 

and to assess whether you’re meeting your process 

objectives. If your plan designates that certain tactics 

will be used to reach a certain number of targeted 

partners, an outreach log can be used to document 

how many people were reached in an outreach activity and what tactics were used. Data across outreach 

events can be summarized to measure your progress 

in meeting these process objectives. 

To conduct an outcome evaluation, you’ll need to 

determine what realistic outcomes you hope to 

achieve. Once again, these outcomes should be 

linked directly to your program’s goals and objectives. 

Although the monitoring and tracking system can 

help you to determine whether you reached the 

expected number of targeted partners and what tactics were most effective in recruiting them, it won’t tell 

you how your intervention affected these participants. 

One outcome you’ll probably want to achieve is an 

increase in the targeted partners’ involvement in, and 

commitment to, the counter-marketing program. To 

learn whether this occurred, you must develop and 

use valid and reliable measures of commitment and 

involvement. For example, if you hope that your 

efforts will move a certain percentage of partners 

from being Allies to Believers, you’ll need to clearly 

define what constitutes an Ally and a Believer. These 

definitions then should be used to accurately assess 

whether audience members have made this change. 

Short surveys administered before the grassroots 

activity takes place (presurvey or baseline survey) 

and after it concludes (postsurvey) can determine 

participants’ increased commitment to the issue and 

their intention to become more involved in the campaign. You could also follow up with a representative 

sample of the participants to see whether they have 

become more involved or committed. 

Another outcome you’ll want to achieve is making the 

Allies and Believers credible spokespeople. You can 

measure this through surveys among individuals 

aware of the grassroots work. For example, you can ask 

them whether they heard a speech by a representative 

of the organization (e.g., SWAT) or whether they talked 

with a member of the organization. Then you can ask 

them about their impressions of these Allies and 

Believers, what they learned from them, and other 

questions that would provide useful information. 

Using Evaluation Results for Decision 

Making 

If your evaluation results indicate that certain partners 

are more effective than others, this may tell you something about their credibility and help you decide which 

ones to work with in the future. If the results show that 

certain tactics or messages were more effective than 

others in involving the target audience or that they 

were more appealing to Allies than Believers, this information can help you better plan how to involve people 

initially and increase participants’ involvement. After 

each round of grassroots activities, you’ll see what 

worked and what didn’t so that your next opportunity 

will be more fruitful. By evaluating your efforts regularly, you’ll learn more about how to engage your partners 

and target audience, how to solicit their initial involvement in the counter-marketing program, and how to 

increase their commitment. 
280 Chapter 10: Grassroots Marketing 

Points To Remember 

In grassroots marketing, the bottom line is engagement. You’re not just persuading people, you’re 

getting them involved. This activity can be much more challenging than airing advertising or staging 

a press event. You’re working with volunteers, not paid contractors, so they can bow out if they’re not 

feeling motivated, rewarded, or satisfied. However, the potential benefits are enormous. An ad may 

run for several months, but true Believers are around for a long time. 

Bibliography 

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Health, August 1999. Reprinted with corrections. 

Godin S. Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers. New York, NY: 

Simon and Schuster, 1999. 

Hall GE, Hord SM. Implementing Change: Patterns, Principles, and Potholes. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2001. 

McKenzie-Mohr D, Smith W. Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social 

Marketing. Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 1999.